Will You Join Me in Voting for Neither Trump Nor Clinton?

The Democratic Party’s undemocratic primaries are not over, and nobody has won them. It is entirely possible that Hillary Clinton will not be nominated for any office. That doesn’t prevent us from going ahead and committing to never vote for either her or Donald Trump for president of the United States.

Making this commitment could send a badly needed message to the world: There are people in the United States with some minimal level of decency. It could also kickstart the movement that will be needed to resist the regime of whichever of them wins. It could also alert Californian Democrats to the need to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary.

There’s a cartoon floating around at which a Muslim U.S. voter tries to choose between “Ban my relatives from entering country” and “Bomb the s— out of my relatives.” Not much of a choice, is it? Especially when the bomber is following the model of our current president with his record deportations, and the banner is a loose cannon who’s proposed to kill the families of designated enemies in the Middle East.

This is the essence of the problem. Whichever of these two you were to vote for, you’d get wars, nasty policies toward immigrants, plutocratic policies toward wealth, and destructive policies toward the natural environment — barring the arising of a powerful popular movement to bring the government under control.

Sure, one candidate is a comically ill-informed jackass who hates women, while the other is a woman whose comically jackassy policies will come with great scholarly volumns of ill information. But where does either of those really get us?

Lesser evilism predictably produces a pair of candidates each cycle who are both worse than was the more evil candidate last time. This cannot go on forever, and has already gone too far. We need a nonviolent movement to reform our election system — something not done through elections. But there are plenty of good candidates, such as Jill Stein, to check or write in. We should vote for those good candidates and get right back to work on improving the world.